Talaria
by SpectralScathath
Summary: Because he's only selfish, and he got strong. An introspective look at Mercury Black.


_I'm the One_

_Who was born in a nightmare, a murderer's son_

_Got no gun_

_But I gleam like a blade and I'm harder than iron_

* * *

"What's in it for me?" He asks, breath catching in his throat and tasting like blood. The heat of the fire devouring his home is on his back, eating away at every memory held in those walls. Setting it on fire wasn't what he meant to do, but he can't regret it.

Regret was for the weak, and Mercury Black wasn't fucking weak.

The burn against his back matches the ache that radiates from purple on his cheek. It's fractured. He can tell. It was comfortably familiar to him, just like his broken ribs, both utterly eclipsed by the pain in his legs. He thought he knew pain before this, but he's realising real damn quick that he knows nothing of hurt.

His father's there on the ground, dead by his own son's hand, murdered by the attack dog he'd spent nineteen years breaking in. He spat on the ground in front of him, and he can see his own blood marbled in the spittle. That's not new.

But something's new. There are two women in front of him, women he's never seen before. Their eyes, orange and red, they match the flames turning the only home he's ever had to ash. He can see the light reflecting in their eyes, flecks of gold dancing in the irises.

The woman with orange eyes, the one who asked his name, called him Marcus Black's son, she's talking. He can see her lips making words, but the world is quiet. Muffled. Full of static. The world hazes around the edges as the colours fade out, and this is familiar too.

His first idea is this. He could fight them. Kill them both, make it to the nearest town, fix himself up with whatever first aid supplies he can find. He doesn't need their help. He doesn't need anyone but himself.

His first realization is that it would never work. He catalogues the reasons. His aura is long since broken, which is also not new, his father broke it daily, sometimes more. He just fought his father. The bastard didn't go down easy, and the sheer agony in his legs, distanced from his brain only by adrenaline, tells Mercury that his father didn't go down without taking a few chunks out of his killer.

He has no weapons. He doesn't need weapons, but when he's this drained, they're useful. He doesn't know where the nearest settlement is. All he's ever known is this hilltop, these mountains, those trees, his home. Any jobs he was taken on were left using a route that stayed away from humanity.

He's in pain. He's hooked up on violence and hatred and anger and fear and so much fucking_ pain_. He's a beacon for Grimm, and he's tired. He didn't make it through everything he has to die in the jaws of a beast.

He can't fight. He can't run. He doesn't know how to do anything else.

He looked at the woman with orange eyes and decides to take whatever offer she's giving, at least until he's alive enough to leave her and her little lackey in the dust.

* * *

He wakes up in a bed that's softer than anything he's ever been in before, and he feels like he's going to sink through the floor. It's too soft to be comfortable. He opens his eyes to a room that's sterile and white and he hates it. He assesses his surroundings. He can hear a beeping sound that sounds like a heart rate monitor. He recognises it from a movie he watched once, before his father caught him.

The beep is annoying as fuck. But he's alone. He taps into his aura, gunmetal grey covering him for a moment, and he knows he's alone.

He remembers the women, both of them with eyes like fire and blood, and honestly that is basically the running themes for that entire night. Fire and blood and death. His name is Mercury Black, and he killed his father.

He makes himself smile at that. Now he was finally fucking_ free._

He runs through his mental checklist of his own body, and comes up short immediately. Where is the pain. He can't feel any pain. He's been living with pain every moment of every day for almost as long as he can remember. Pain was his oldest and only friend.

It's too unfamiliar, to have none of it.

His checklist does not get better, because he raises his arms, moving his hands, stretching and curling his fingers. Two fingers on his right hand are somewhat crooked, from old breaks that didn't heal entirely right. No self-respecting assassin was reliant on only one hand, his father had said.

He grabs that memory and shoves it down as deep as he can, locking it away with everything else. Those memories were gone now. They burnt away with his childhood home, as far as he was concerned.

His hands and arms are in good condition, although there are bandages on his left from where he split open his knuckles on his father's face. There's also a needle in his right wrist, hooked up to a bag of red blood, but he gives absolutely no fucking shits.

He felt a pressure around his chest and glances at the bandages. Right. He had cracked ribs. Possibly caved in enough to pierce a lung, if he spent too long wondering why he'd been coughing up blood in the first place. Whatever. His aura was back and could get to work on fixing those.

The complete lack of pain was seriously unnerving him at this point, because he couldn't feel his legs. They'd hurt more than almost anything when he'd last been cognizant, and the complete lack of feeling didn't feel right after that.

He wiggles his toes.

Nothing happened.

He blinks. Stares at the covers thrown over him. Wiggles his feet again.

No movement. He couldn't see anything. He couldn't feel _anything._

He rips the covers off. Stares at where his legs should be. There are bandages wrapped around what's left of his thighs, the ends stained slightly red.

He doesn't scream.

He doesn't do anything.

He doesn't feel anything.

Everything is grey.

* * *

He sits in a wheelchair, staring at two rails in front of him. They're about his hip height, and placed just a little beyond shoulder-width apart.

He pretends his hands don't shake as he grabs the bars again. Cinder is watching him, hands folded patiently in her lap. He doesn't trust her. She has eyes like Marcus. He knows that he is nothing to her but a rabid dog for her to point at an enemy and let off the leash.

He's fine with that. It's what his father raised him for, anyway. He's not like Emerald, who hangs off Cinder's every word and craves love and affection with a naïve devotion that will absolutely get her killed. He knows that Cinder doesn't care about him, and he doesn't care about her. What they have is a business deal.

These legs, his mobility, his life, that is her deal. And his skills are his debt.

His knuckles are white as they tighten on the bars, his usual gloves currently gone, and he hoists himself up on pure core strength. He can hold himself like this for as long as he wants before there's even a shake in his arms. There's extra weight with his metal legs, easily now half his bodyweight if not more.

But upper body workouts aren't why he's here. He grits his teeth and gingerly places one foot on the ground, the metal clacking as the heel had a slight spring to it. His knee bends with the motion with a mechanical whirr, and he's still getting used to how the ports feel against the ends of his thighs.

He has one foot on the ground. That bit was getting easier.

He shifts his grip and places the next down, somewhat in front. It's a tiny step. But it's better than no step at all.

Three more steps, and he's halfway along the bars. He can feel Cinder watching him like a hawk, but he tunes her out. His focus is on getting to the end of the damn rails. He hasn't done it yet, and he'd like to make some actual fucking progress on relearning how to walk.

Another step. His legs ache a bit from the ports. Cinder shifts her weight. He catches the movement in his peripheral. Her glass heels clink on the floor, and his vision tunnels. For a moment everything is dark and there is glass shattering around him and his father is wrenching his mouth open and there's whiskey down his throat and it burns holy shit it burns and-

There is a hand on his shoulder.

He reacts.

"Mercury." A purr. A woman's purr. _That is not Marcus's voice._

The world snaps back into focus, blurred around the edges, and Mercury can't remember where he is for a second.

He hears a chuckle, feels a warm hand run up and down his bicep, there is something pulsing under his fingers. He blinks and he's holding his fucking _boss_ down to the ground with his hands around her throat and a knee pressed into her stomach to pin her there and the kinky bitch is fucking smiling what the actual hell.

He lets go immediately and rolls to the side, sitting back up and slicking his hand through his hair. His legs are in an awkward position but he's still learning to use them so who fucking cares. Cinder rubs her throat and moves with the kind of grace only real killers have, her fringe falling over her eye as she smiles again at him.

Kinky fucking bitch.

"It looks like you still have some fight in you after all," she husks, getting to her feet as her heels click. He tries not to flinch at the sound and mostly manages it.

Of course she notices. Cinder is a sadist of the highest order and she thrives on weakness. But he's useful to her at the moment, once he figures out how to do the most basic shit, so she won't use it against him.

He'll keep his guard up anyway.

But he smirks like he doesn't care about anything, and reaches up to grab the bars, hoisting himself back up for another go. "Isn't that what you're paying me for?"

Her eyes gleam hungrily, orange flecked with gold. Exactly like Marcus's, aside from the colour.

He really had to work on making sure he was useful quick.

* * *

He tries once. When his father was dead. Of course he tries.

He waits until he was alone in his quarters, with a locked door between him and Cinder. Emerald doesn't even come into the equation. She hates him because he took up Cinder's precious attention with his rehabilitation.

He lifts himself out of his wheelchair and onto his bed, which was still way too soft for his tastes but something he was starting to tolerate, and he tries.

He reaches for his semblance.

There's nothing. Just that cold, hollow, empty, _ache_ that sat in his chest like a lead block, where his father had ripped out his soul and never put him back together again.

He almost wants to laugh. He never got it back when his father was alive, so wasn't killing him meant to fix that?

Instead it seemed that Mercury had killed the one chance he had to ever get it back.

He wants to laugh. Isn't it funny?

_He cuts his scars until they bleed instead._

* * *

He relearns how to walk. He teaches himself how to fight again. He builds his greaves and puts a barrel in his prosthetics. He brings down the Fall Maiden. He goes to Haven. From there, Beacon. He fights and he fights and he fights until Yang Xiao Long fucking kneecaps him. He has to respect that, it's exactly his style.

He smirks as Ruby Rose cries over her dead friend and he records the Fall of Beacon because Cinder tells him to, and he finds her later on top of the destroyed tower. Her eye is missing. Her _arm_ is missing. To be honest, half her fucking face is missing.

Emerald cries because of course she fucking does. Mercury is the one who picks her up and carries her back down to the ground. They'd had a plan. Once the tower had fallen, and Cinder had completed her mission, they were going to a rendezvous point where Cinder would return to her boss. He'd figured Cinder had a boss. He also figured that anyone Cinder respected enough to work for was not someone he had any interest in meeting.

His plan had been to make himself scarce during the chaos and confusion of the Fall. He could disappear. He could be free.

His plan doesn't even get a chance to work.

Mercury Black meets Salem, Queen of Grimm.

She looks into his silver eyes, into his crippled and mangled soul, and she smiles. Exactly like Cinder. Exactly like Marcus.

He tells himself he's right where he's supposed to be.

* * *

_I'm the One_

_Who was ripped from the earth and exposed to the sun_

_Overrun_

_By the hate and the beatings, defiled by a father_


End file.
